|
|
|
|
|
|
| There are widows and widows; there are those who are
| bereaved and those who are released; those who lose their
| support and those whose chains are broken; those who are
| sunk in desolation and those who wake up into freedom.
| Of the first we will not speak. Theirs is a sorrow too
| sacred to be publicly handled even with sympathy; but
| the second demand no such respectful reticence. The
| widow who is no sooner released from one husband than
| she plots for another, and the widow who leaps into
| liberty over the grave of a gaoler, not a lover, are fair
| game enough. They have always been favourite subjects
| whereon authors may exercise their wits; and while men
| are what they are ~~ laughing animals apt to see the
| humour lying in incongruity, and with a spice of the devil
| to sharpen that same laughter into satire ~~ they will
| remain favourite subjects, tragic as the state is when
| widowhood is deeper than mere outward condition.
| There are many varieties of the widow and all are not
| beautiful. For one, there is the widow who is bent on
| re-marrying whether men like it or not;
|
| that thing of prey who goes about the world seeking
| whom she may devour; that awful creature who bears
| down on her victims with a vigour in her assaults which
| puts to flight the popular fancy about the weaker sex and
| the natural distribution of power. No hawk poised over a
| brood of hedge birds, no shark cruising steadily towards a
| shoal of small fry, no piratical craft sailing under a free
| flag and accountable to no law save success, was ever
| more formidable to the weaker things pursued than is the
| hawk widow to men when she is bent on re-marrying.
| She knows so much! there is not a manuvre by which a
| victory can be stolen that she has not mastered and she is
| not afraid of even the most desperate measures. When
| she has once struck, he would be a clever man and a
| strong one who should escape her. Generally left but
| meagerly provided for in worldly goods ~~ else her game
| would not be difficult ~~ she makes up for her financial
| poverty by her wealth of bold resources, and by the
| courage with which she takes her own fortunes in hand
| and, with her own, those of her more eligible masculine
| associates. She is a woman of purpose and lives for an
| end; and that end is remarriage, with the most favourable
| settlement that can be obtained by her lawyer from his. If
| fate has dealt hardly by her ~~ though, may be,
| compassionately by her successive spouses ~~ and has
| landed her in the widowed state twice or thrice, she is in
| nowise daunted and as little abashed. She merely refits
| after a certain time of anchorage, and goes out into the
| open again
|
| for a repetition of her chance. She has no notion of a
| perpetuity of weeds, and, though she may have cleared
| her half century with a margin besides, thinks the
| suggestive orange-blossoms of the bride infinitely more
| desirable than the fruitless heliotrope of the widow. If
| one husband is taken, she remembers the old proverb, and
| reflects on the many, quite as good, who are left
| potentially subject to her choice. And somehow she
| manages. It has been said that any woman can marry any
| man if she determines to do so, and follows on the line of
| her determination with tenacity and common-sense.
| The hawk widow exemplifies the truth of this saying.
| She determines upon marriage; and she usually succeeds;
| the question being one of victim only, not of sacrifice.
| One has to fall to her share; there is no help for it; and the
| whole contest is, which shall it be? which is strongest to
| break her bonds? which craftiest to slip out of them?
| which most resolute not to bear them from the beginning?
| This the straggling covey must settle among themselves
| the best way they can. When the hawk pounces down
| upon its quarry, it is
| But all cannot be saved. One has to be caught; and the
| choice is determined partly by chance and partly by
| relative strength. When the widow of experience and
| resolve bears down on her prey,
| the result is equally certain. Floundering avails nothing;
| struggling and splashing are just as futile; one among the
| crowd has to come to the slaughter,
|
| like Mrs. Bond's ducks, and to assist at his own
| immolation. The best thing he can do is to make a
| handsome surrender, and to let the world of men and
| brothers believe he rather likes his position than not.
| But there are pleasanter types of the re-marrying widow
| than this. There is the widow of the Wadman kind, who
| has outlived her grief and is not disinclined to a repetition
| of the matrimonial experiment, if asked humbly by an
| experimenter after her own heart. But she must be asked
| humbly that she may grant in a pretty, tender, womanly
| way ~~ if not quite so timidly as a girl, yet as becomingly
| in her degree, and with that peculiar fascination which
| nothing but the combination of experience and modesty
| can give. The widow of the Wadman kind is no creature
| of prey, neither shark nor hawk; at the worst she is but a
| cooing dove, making just the sweetest little noise in the
| world, the tenderest little call to indicate her whereabouts,
| and to show that she is lonely and feels a-cold. She sits
| close, waiting to be found, and does not ramp and dash
| about like the hawk sisterhood; neither does she pretend
| that she is unwilling to be found, still less deny that a soft
| warm nest, well lined and snugly sheltered, is better than
| a lonely branch stretching out comfortless and bare into
| the bleak wide world. She, too, is almost sure to get what
| she wants, with the advantage of being voluntarily chosen
| and not unwillingly submitted to.
| This is the kind of woman who is always mildly
|
| but thoroughly happy in her married life; unless indeed
| her husband should be a brute, which heaven forefend.
| She lives in peace and bland contentment while the fates
| permit, and when he dies she buries him decently and
| laments him decorously; but she thinks it folly to spend
| her life in weeping by the side of his cold grave, when her
| tears can do no good to either of them. Rather she thinks
| it a proof of her love for him, and the evidence of how
| true was her happiness, that she should elect to give him a
| successor. Her blessed experience in the past has made
| her trustful of the future; and because she has found one
| man faithful she thinks that all are Abdiels. As a rule,
| this type of woman does find men pleasant; and by her
| own nature she ensures domestic happiness. She is
| always tenderly, and never passionately, in love, even
| with the husband she has loved the best. She gives in to
| no excesses to the right nor to the left. Her temperament
| is of that serene moonlight kind which does not fatigue
| others nor wear out its possessor. Without ambition or
| the power to fling herself into any absorbing occupation,
| she lives only to please and be pleased at home; and if
| she be not a wife, wearing her light fetters lovingly and
| proud that she is fettered, she is nothing. As some
| women are born mothers and others are born nuns, so is
| the Wadman woman a born wife, and shines in no other
| character nor capacity. But in this she excels; and
| knowing
|
| this, she sticks to her role,
| how frequently so ever the protagonist may be
| changed.
|
| There are widows, however, who have no thought nor
| desire for remaining anything but widows ~~ who have
| gained the worth of the world in their condition.
| ! says the French wife, eyeing askance.
| Can the most exacting woman ask for more? And truly
| such a one is in the most enviable position possible to a
| woman, supposing always that she has not lost her
| husband the man she loved. If she has lost only the man
| who sat by right at the same hearth with herself ~~
| perhaps the man who quarreled with her across the ashes
| ~~ she has lost her burden and gained her release.
| The cross of matrimony lies heavy on many a woman
| who never takes the world into her confidence, and who
| bears in absolute silence what she has not the power to
| cast from her. Perhaps her husband has been a man of
| note, a man of learning, of elevated station, a political or
| a philanthropic power. She alone knew the fretfulness,
| the petty tyranny, the miserable smallness at home of the
| man of large repute whom his generation conspired to
| honour, and whose public life was a mark for the future
| to date by. When he died the press wrote his eulogy and
| his elegy; but his widow, when she put on her weeds,
| sang softly in her own heart a pćan to the great King of
| Freedom, and whispered to herself Laudamus with a sigh
| of unutterable
|
| relief. To such a woman widowhood has no
| sentimental regrets. She has come into possession of the
| goods for which perhaps she sold herself; she is young
| enough to enjoy the present and to project a future; she
| has the free choice of a maid and the free action of a
| matron, as no other woman has. She may be courted and
| she need not be chaperoned, nor yet forced to accept.
| Experience has mellowed and enriched her; for though
| the asperities of her former condition were sharp while
| they lasted, they have not permanently roughened nor
| embittered her. Then the sense of relief gladdens, while
| the sense of propriety subdues, her; and the delicate
| mixture of outside melancholy, tempered with internal
| warmth, is wonderfully enticing. Few men know how to
| resist that gentle sadness which does not preclude the
| sweetest sympathy with pleasures in which she may not
| join ~~ with happiness which is, alas ~ denied her. It
| gives an air of such profound unselfishness; it asks so
| mutely, so bewitchingly, for consolation!
| Even a hard man is moved at the sight of a pretty young
| widow in the funereal black of her first grief, sitting apart
| with a patient smile and eyes cast meekly down, as one
| not of the world though in it. Her loss is too recent to
| admit of any thought of reparation; and yet what man
| does not think of that time of reparation? and if she be
| more than usually charming in person and well dowered
| in purse, what man does not think of himself as the best
| repairer she could take? Then, as time goes on and she
| glides
|
| gracefully into the era of mitigated grief, how beautiful is
| her whole manner, how tasteful her attire! The most
| exquisite colours of the prismatic scale look garish beside
| her dainty tints, and the untempered mirth of happy girls
| is coarse beside her subdued admission of moral sunshine.
| Greys as tender as a dove's breast; regal purples which
| have a glow behind their gloom; stately silks of somber
| black softly veiled by clouds of gauzy white or
| brightened with the 'dark light' of sparkling jet ~~ all
| speak of passing time and the gradual blooming of the
| spring after the sadness of the winter; all symbolize the
| flowers which are growing on the sod that covers the dear
| departed; all hint at a melting of the funereal gloom into
| the starlight of a possible bridal. She begins too to take
| pleasure in the old familiar things of life. She steals into
| a quiet back seat at the Opera; she just walks through a
| quadrille; she sees no harm in a fete or flower-show, if
| properly companioned. Winter does not last for ever; and
| a life-long mourning is a wearisome prospect. So she
| goes through her degrees in accurate order, and comes
| out at the end radiant.
| For when the faint shadows cast by the era of mitigated
| grief fade away, she is the widow par
| excellence ~~ the blooming widow, young, rich,
| gay, free; with the world on her side, her fortune in her
| hand, the ball at her foot. She is the freest woman alive;
| freer even than any old maid to be found. Freedom,
| indeed, comes to the old maid
|
| when too late to enjoy it; at least in certain directions; for
| while she is young she is necessarily in bondage, and
| when parents and guardians leave her at liberty, the world
| and Mrs. Grundy take up the reins and hold them pretty
| tight. But the widow is as thoroughly emancipated from
| the conventional bonds which confine the free action of a
| maid as she is from those which fetter the wife; and only
| she herself knows what she has lost and gained. She bore
| her yoke well while it pressed on her. It galled her but
| she did not wince; only when it was removed, did she
| become fully conscious of how great had been the burden,
| from her sense of infinite relief through her freedom. The
| world never knew that she had passed under the harrow;
| probably therefore it wonders at her cheerfulness, with
| the dear departed scarce two years dead; and some say
| how sweetly resigned she is, and others how unfeeling.
| She is neither. She is simply free after having lived in
| bondage; and she is glad in consequence. But she is
| dangerous. In fact, she is the most dangerous of all
| women to men's peace of mind. She does not want to
| marry again ~~ does not mean to marry again for many
| years to come, if ever; granted; but this does not say that
| she is indifferent to admiration or careless of men's
| society. And being without serious intentions herself, she
| does not reflect that she may possibly mislead and
| deceive others who have no such cause as she has to
| beware of the pleasant folly of love and its results.
|
| In the exercise of her prerogative as a free woman, able to
| cultivate the dearest friendships with men and fearlessly
| using her power, she entangles many a poor fellow's heart
| which she never wished to engage more than platonically,
| and crushes hopes which she had not the slightest
| intention to raise. Why cannot men be her friends? she
| asks, with a pretty, pleading look ~~ a tender kind of
| despair at the wrong-headedness of the stronger sex. But,
| tender as she is, she does not easily yield even when she
| loves. The freedom she has gone through so much to
| gain she does not rashly throw away; and if ever the day
| comes when she gives it up into the keeping of another
| ~~ and for all her protestations it comes sometimes ~~
| the man to whom she succumbs may congratulate himself
| on a victory more flattering to his vanity, and more
| complete in its surrender of advantages, than he could
| have gained over any other woman. Belle or heiress, of
| higher rank or of greater fame than himself, no unmarried
| woman could have made such a sacrifice in her marriage
| as did this widow of means and good looks, when she
| laid her freedom, her joyous present and potential future,
| in his hand. He will be lucky if he manages so well that
| he is never reproached for that sacrifice ~~ if his wife
| never looks back regretfully to the time when she was
| widow ~~ if there are no longer glances forward to
| possibilities ahead, mingled with sighs at the difficulty of
| retracing a step when made. On the whole, if a woman
| can live without love, or with
|
| nothing stronger than a tender sentimental friendship,
| widowhood is the most blissful state she can attain. But
| if she be of a loving nature and fond of home, finding her
| own happiness in the happiness of others and indifferent
| to freedom ~~ thinking, indeed, that feminine freedom is
| only another word for desolation ~~ she will be miserable
| until she has doubled her experience and carried on the
| old into the new.